Rock Health, a new seed accelerator devoted exclusively to interactive health care applications, opened up their offices last week to eleven start-ups who are in the process of developing mobile and web based healthcare technology.

Rock Health is using the Y-Combinator model of making extremely early stage investments in a number of different startups in hopes of nurturing them to viability. They plan on doing this by providing access to office space in San Francisco, branding, communications and legal support as well as access to mentoring and Rock Health medical partners like Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School.

Halle Tecco - Co-Founder & Managing Director Rock Health

I had the opportunity to speak with Rock Health co-founder and Managing Director Halle Tecco who explained that while things were somewhat chaotic in the new office space people were settling in and great work was being done.

Rock Health’s initial group of startups will all be working from within the new offices and they’ll be joined by at least 20 other ‘member startups’. These companies will have access to Rock Health support and expertise as well as access to the office space for meetings but Rock Health is not, at present, funding them.

We started our conversation by discussing the expectations that Rock Health had for this initial group of startups. According to Halle “the 11 startups came to us at different stages of their development. Some came to us with just a great idea and a great team while others had teams that had already released a product to the market. So across that spectrum we have different expectations based upon where they started.”

She continued by saying “generally we hope they make significant progress in two places. One is the product, getting a really well designed meaningful product up and running and being testing with our hospital partners, patients and medical professionals. And second there is the business behind the product. Thinking through the financing model and how they’ll get access to capital to grow. Coming up with the business plan and the revenue model, coming up with a really solid story and then connecting them with the investors.”

As a seed accelerator Rock Health wants to be able to remove the hurdles that most startups face when trying to launch their businesses. By providing access and support to the founders while they focus on building their applications Rock Health will significantly smooth the pathway to building the type of sustainable company that venture investors are actively looking to invest in. Of course the relationships that Rock Health has with their medical partners should be invaluable to new healthcare technology companies as well. [Read more…]

There is an ambitious new player getting started in the healthcare IT space. Recently launched Rock Health is taking a completely different approach to developing healthcare technology by offering funding and business incubator services to start-up healthcare IT companies.

This is a model that has been in use for years, most recently by Y Combinator in the web space, but this is the first business incubator I’ve seen specifically for healthcare. In the basic incubator model the incubator company, in this case Rock Health, provides small amounts of initial funding with significant amounts of business guidance and expertise in hopes of generating a number of successful technology companies.

Y Combinator has been in the business incubator business since 2005 and since that time they’ve funded over 250 companies. The most successful start-ups to have grown out Y Combinator have been web applications that provide targeted, specific business functions that are easy to understand and to use.

If Rock Health is using them as a model, and it appears that they are, we can expect them to begin launching companies offering tightly targeted web-based and mobile healthcare applications that initially offer a single valuable function. I wouldn’t be surprised to see several new apps from Rock Health companies being actively marketed in both the iTunes and Android Market App Stores by the end of this year.

Rock Health Founder Halle Tecco told TechCrunch that some examples of potential products were healthcare monitoring apps via the iPhone that can update physicians on chronic conditions or iPad games that can be used as hospital therapy for sick kids.

According to the TechCrunch article Ms. Tecco has raised $500,000 for Rock Health which will be used to initially fund at least a dozen start-up companies. In addition to the cash Rock Health companies will gain access to the Rock Health contacts at hospitals, healthcare organizations and the FDA to help overcome the barriers facing most start-up companies.

The incubator model generally targets the use the initial funding and business expertise to reach the product launch phase after which additional funding is often sought. Since some of the initial backers of Rock Health are Venture Capital firms opportunities for additional funding of Rock Health companies with viable products appear to be positive. According to the website Rock Health’s investors include Accel Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Aberdare Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, the California HealthCare Foundation, Fenwick & West LLP, Microsoft HealthVault, Nike and Qualcomm.